Flood of Lies: The St. Rita's Nursing Home Tragedy Paperback - 2015

"When an elderly couple is charged with murder in the drowning deaths of thirty-five bed-ridden residents of St. Rita's Nursing Home, an emotional edge-of-your-seat thriller takes off like a shot! The players: a wily and profane defense lawyer, a ferocious prosecutor, vengeful families of the victims, and a ravenous media that brands the defendants 'Monsters of Hurricane Katrina.' My advice--block out enough time to read this wonderful book in one sitting."
--John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

"In Flood of Lies Cobb--a profane, hard-drinking New Orleans resident with a racy prose style--tells the story of what happened as he and his partners prepared to defend the Manganos in court. . . . While Cobb is hardly a disinterested narrator, he is an irresistible one. . . . Flood of Lies isn't an example of objective reporting; it is a passionate and personal book, artfully constructed to maximize suspense, and carried along by the compelling narrative voice of Cobb. Above all, it reminds us of how messy and imperfect are the processes of law, how chancy are the outcomes of trials, how outrageously costly, both financially and emotionally, the pursuit of justice can be."
--Michael Dirda, the Washington Post

"Cobb's kaleidoscopic personality drives the momentum in what amounts to a war story of jurisprudence. . . . With Cobb's pugilistic legal tactics high-octane personality for plot fuel, Flood of Lies becomes a book you wish wouldn't end."
--Jason Berry, the Daily Beast

"This is more than a story about Katrina. It is that, told from an original perspective, but it's also a story of abuse of power, of political ambition, of survival, and of a trying to make life ordinary again--when ordinariness amounts to triumph."
--John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America

"What Jim Cobb captures better than any writer I've read is how deeply the media's pre-trial feeding-frenzy shaped public perceptions about the St. Rita's nursing home tragedy. . . . Cobb's brash, brilliant storytelling takes you behind the scenes of an important test for the American system of justice."
--Ken Bode, former national political correspondent, NBC News

Front-jacket photograph (c) CARLOS BARRIA/Corbis